How to Improve Your Website’s UX in 2018 – Effective Tips

One of the major factors that drive engagement on your website is none other than the user experience (UX) that your website provides them. All this is collectively determined by a range of factors, such as the usability, efficiency, and accessibility that is extended to the users during the interaction process with your website. Precisely, it is the takeaway that is what user experience is implying to make it simpler.

It is how you made your people feel, while they were at your site that will determine whether they will stay here or leave forever. If your UX is astonishing, then, undoubtedly your conversion rates will increase. That is, your conversion rate is directly proportional to the user experience. If you offer a great UX, then people will continuously come back and refer others to you for the different and unique experience that you offer.

A better UX offers higher engagement, which will improve chances of sales ultimately enhancing the growth of your business. Some businesses have achieved their target of enticing customers with exceptional UX. So, what is it that they are doing differently and you are not. Let us explore in detail.

1) We are running short of time

Yes, what you read is right. There is no time to waste. Just like you, your users are also short of time. They do not have the entire day to scroll through the website, and sit back and think about what has to be done and what not. Here, the simple and effective thing that you should be doing to make their task is easier is to introduce seamless and intuitive scrolling. Give them a chance to engage with their sensory organs the instant they arrive at your site with a path that will lead them to their destination without too many hassles. People love easier routes rather than struggling through difficult ones.

2) Site audit is important

Insights and feedback provide room for improvisation. Many experts are of the opinion that is it important that you seek recommendations from your sponsors or stakeholders for their opinion about your website. Get them answer a few questions, such as their experiences on the site, how far has it helped them with their concerns, have they successfully accomplished their goals or are they being forced to sign up for newsletters or whitepapers that they would never in the wildest of their dreams want to read and many more. Once you are done with this audit, you will have a clear picture of where you are heading to, which is important in the long run. It is time to cut the crap and prioritize what is important and what is not. There would be numerous small and minute, and even large aspects that need to be fixed, which you can do with ease.

3) A/B testing helps

Once you are done with audit, we recommend you to implement the A/B testing methodology, which will provide you crystal clear answers when it comes to the usability part of the solutions that you are offering online. What if the A/B testing introduced you to a different side of your users that you never imagined of – what if they were doing it wrong all the time and all their attempts were in vain!

This would be your loss as well as theirs. Businesses that attempted A/B testing got hold of some vital data, wherein they could observe how their users were behaving, which might not meet their expectation of users (though at the design time). This helped them to identify the errors and fix them for better. The next time, a new user arrives the results are already in favor of their thought process. So, there is no disappointment. (This means you are paving a way to creating better relationships through enhanced UX.)

4) Usability tests are important

Now that you have done A/B testing, the next should be usability test. A lot of things might seem obvious to you and your team, but it is not the same for your people. There are a lot of things that need to be understood by your people. Get them to do the usability tests and this will help you further. Implement neuroscience and eye-tracking, which will help you to detect and analyze the factors that engage your customers to the site. Also, you will be able to find the areas of your site where user engagement is happening and where it is not.

It will help you to fix the issues by learning what your customers are expecting and how their mind works while they are at your site. Of course, there is always room for improvement, but the scope of improvisation depends on how well you know the usability factors that need improvisation here. You can flag the content side, introduce interactive characteristics and also, experiment on a variety of ideas to see which of these will actually suffice the needs of your users.

Running the usability test once will help you to identify the mindset of your people for a particular season. But, as trends change, people and their needs, and ideas change as well. So, it is important that you conduct these usability tests time and again.

5) Reduce the number of pages on your website

This might not be an easy task – but challenging. How about reducing around 50% of the total number of pages on your site!

Overloading your site with too much of content is not good. Yeah, content is needed for your site. But, there is an optimal quantity of this content. Not too much and not too less. Don’t inundate your site with a river of content. People are smarter than before, so they want it simple and precise. Let us cut the clutter and get to the point.

Keep on bragging, and each time, you will end up losing a new customer. It is time to trim of all those extra flabs of content on your site. Everything seems to be important, but there is less important content that you can surely cut off. Who is ready to take up the challenge?

6) What is the speed of your page loading time?

Google has been reminding us every fortnight that if the page loading speed of our website is feeble, then we will lag behind, which will impact our rankings in the long run.

If you haven’t taken this warning or notification seriously, then there is no more time to waste. Time to act – a number of site visitors or users are returning or bouncing from your site mainly because your site takes too long to load.

This could be due to the presence of images that take too long to load, which can be avoided by using compressing tools such as TinyPNG.com and the content delivery network (CDN), eliminate large files, including videos, and compress the code.

7) Tagging

Have you not yet utilized the power of Google Tag Manager – then, you are seriously missing out on something. This something is nothing, but you are failing to offer your users with a uniform and seamless user journeys. And, you do not have the right to refuse them of this privilege of theirs. Tagging is nothing but you tag content to solutions or services that you are offering, while also these tags may lead to people connected with that specific content or case studies. In the past, this was a manual process, but now tagging takes people across all those places that they need to reach for getting a clear idea of what they are looking for. All this paves the way to a wonderful UX.

8) Are you fulfilling user needs?

The most important question that you should be asking is that whether you are fulfilling all your user’s needs? A great marketing strategy is born when you take into account your user’s needs, expectations, concerns, what brings them here and pain points. You need to consider the various users and their characters, which are typically different, their objectives, the tasks or responsibilities they are undertaking. Taking into consideration all these factors, you can design a user journey that would provide an enhanced UX for all the different types of users who arrive at your site.

9) Choose your words carefully

The content on your site as we had discussed previously says a lot about you and your services. The users have no time to read through all that you have to say. So, they skim across it and read to find whether their pain points have been covered. If not, they leave. When you say something, be careful, especially with the CTAs. Do you think by merely asking them to click on submit, they would be interested to click submit? Why would they?

Use an innovative and different idea to form your content that would automatically get clicked rather than frustrating the user.

10) Is your website accessible on different devices?

Another important part of your UX design is responsiveness. Do not forget what Google has been reminding us of. Very soon, we will be stripped off our privilege of being non-responsive, while still enjoying a place across the top rankings. By now, many of those non-responsive websites have already experienced a downfall in their rankings.

We are not far away from the days when such websites will not even linger on the back pages of the search results pages. People are using various devices to access your site. This makes it imperative that your site adjusts accordingly to fit into the device across which it is being accessed regardless of whether the user is using a tablet, smartphone or desktop or the screen resolution.

Also, once it fits into the screen space of a specific device, your website would appear flawless – that is the magic of responsiveness. It is not necessary that people use their PCs or laptops to access your site at all times – whatever comes in handy – whether it is their smartphone or tablet, they get going. Do you want to disappoint people by displaying a broken site when they access it via tablet or mobile? They will never again bother to access it via computers. This will cause you to lose customers who will never come back to your site.

Ensure that you have a responsive website, which can be accessed from anywhere at any time from any device and it allows them to make decisions with no restrictions.

11) Attractive homepage

The homepage of your site is the living room of your home. A glance at your homepage will give an idea of what lies inside. If it is not impressive enough, do you think your people will further bother to ponder on what lies ahead? Remember this is one of the places where you should be including all your site’s important messages that you wish to convey to your people. But, do not stuff in a lot of content. Just be sure that all important ones are covered.

It is not a good UX practice to position everything across the homepage. Do not create a congested feeling by pressing in a lot of facts altogether in one place. Give room to breathe.

As we already discussed, this is where you people arrive and from where their journey begins. So, make sure that it is one such that they feel to go ahead rather than stepping back.

Here are a few steps to ensure that your users are further interested to know what lies ahead:

The content should be simple and short but interesting

All the important and vital information should appear above the fold

Connect all the pages of your site to the homepage

Link the logo to homepage

These are some of the basics of offering a great UX on your website.

Author Bio:

Rajeesh is a Director and Creative Head at Acodez. He helps the company to meet its clients’ needs to craft a compelling online presence. His 10+ years’ experience and expertise in UX, UI, Information Architecture and Wireframing help the company to develop user-friendly, pleasing and aesthetically appealing websites. He regularly researches and writes about the latest trends in web designing and development.

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